For the past two decades harmonically trapped ultracold atomic gases have been used with great success to study fundamental many-body physics in flexible experimental settings. However, the resulting gas density inhomogeneity in those traps has made it challenging to study paradigmatic uniform-system physics (such as critical behavior near phase transitions) or complex quantum dynamics. The realization of homogeneous quantum gases trapped in optical boxes has been a milestone in quantum simulation [1]. These textbook systems have proved to be a powerful playground by simplifying the interpretation of experimental measurements, by making more direct connections to theories of the many-body problem that generally rely on the translational symmetry of the system, and by altogether enabling previously inaccessible experiments. I will give an overview of recent studies on the quantum many-body physics of fermions in a box of light. These studies span the few-body recombination physics of multi-component fermions [2,3], the observation of the fermionic quantum Joule-Thomson effect [4], the strong-drive spectroscopy of Fermi-polaron quasiparticles [5], and the observation of the Lindhard response [6]. These studies have led to some surprising results (including an open puzzle on three component fermions [3]), highlighting how spatial homogeneity not only provide quantitative advantages, but can also unveil truly unexpected outcomes.
[1] N. Navon, R.P. Smith, Z. Hadzibabic, Nature Phys. 17, 1334 (2021)
[2] Y. Ji et al., Phys. Lev. Lett 129, 203402 (2022)
[3] G.L. Schumacher et al., Nature Comm. in press (2025), arXiv:2301.02237
[4] Y. Ji et al., Phys. Lev. Lett 132, 153402 (2024)
[5] F.J. Vivanco et al., Nature Phys. (2025), arXiv:2308.05746
[6] S. Huang et al., Phys. Rev. X 15, 011074 (2025)
Nir Navon is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Yale University. He received his undergraduate degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) with a Master’s degree from the Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France). In 2011, he obtained his Ph.D degree from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), where he developed novel methods to probe the thermodynamics of ultracold strongly correlated gases. He went on to a visiting stay at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), where he developed high-fidelity entangling gates between trapped ions. He was then elected a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College (Cambridge, UK), and joined the Cavendish Laboratory. During that period, he investigated the equilibrium and non-equilibrium behavior of homogeneous gases of weakly interacting bosons using groundbreaking advances in optical box trapping of atoms. He joined the Department of Physics at Yale in 2017.